So far, our (admittedly intermittent) blog entries have discussed how to succeed in the classroom. But there are other opportunities for enterprising law students to learn more about themselves, build their legal skills, and enhance their resumes.
Some of these opportunities may not be available for first-year law students (for example a student at my school must be a 3L to compete on our competitive moot court team). However many schools have programs that allow new law students to get involved and step outside the library.
Here are some of those opportunities:
First and Second Year Moot Court competitions
Moot Courtis a great way to develop one's oral advocacy skills. In a typical Moot Court competition, students argue before a panel of appellate "judges," usually other students or professors. Each student will be given a limited amount of time to argue why the appellate court could either uphold or reverse the judgment of a lower court.
Although my school only lets 3Ls compete on the competitive Moot Court team, which travels around the country and faces off against other schools, it provides opportunities for first and second-year law students to participate as well.
Moot Court can be intense. As you advocate for your client, the judges will frequently interrupt you and ask questions to test your knowledge of the law and see if it can be logically applied to your client's case. In my case, I argued that the government should be allowed to conduct warrantless searches of digital cameras in certain situations.
At my school, the winner of the first year Moot Court competition receives not just recognition but a chance to travel with and perform research for the competitive moot court team.
Other schools will integrate Moot Court into their legal writing curriculum. Your goal will be to write a lengthy appellate brief and then argue against her classmates as part of a graded assignment.
Employers frequently cite Moot Court as something they look for on a resume. While I'm not sure if I want to go into litigation or appellate advocacy, I am very glad I stepped outside my comfort zone and tried Moot Court.
Mock Trial
Mock trial competitions are similar to moot court in that they developed oral advocacy skills. However, mock trial is geared towards the trial court level and thus you will be making arguments to a "jury" of students.
In mock trial, you will practice direct and cross-examination of witnesses as well as opening and closing statements. At my school, we were organized in teams of two, with one partner performing the opening statement and cross examination and the other performing the closing statement and direct examination. I was the former. Cross examination can be exciting, especially if you can catch the other team in a lie! I had a blast working with my partner, who ultimately advanced to the semi-final rounds. (Alas, I did not advance because I did not memorize my opening statement; learn from my mistake!)
The trick, to both moot court and mock trial, is to know the facts of your hypothetical client's case from every dimension. You will have to do this is a real lawyer, so it makes sense to start early.
My school has a competitive mock trial team for 2Ls and 3Ls, and a special competition just for 1Ls.
Law Review/Law Journal
Most schools don't allow students to join a law journal until their second year. In my case, I was allowed to join the law review in my first year because my school has a special division that recruits first-year students.
A law review, in general, is a school's "flagship" publication. Here, students, professors, and other professionals write about emerging legal trends, jurisdictional splits, and other topics such as how the law has impacted classical literature. I am currently writing about recently passed state legislation.
A law journal includes such topics, but is typically more focused on one area of law such as sports law, international business, or admiralty.
Writing for a law journal can be one of the most prestigious things a law student can do. But make no mistake: writing for one of these publications is a substantial time commitment. Typical tasks include managing edits, in which you check the grammar, citations, and substance of another person's work, research assignments in which you gather sources, weekly or monthly deadlines for your personal article, and office hours.
In order to get on the Law Review or a Law Journal students must either be an a certain percentage of their class or compete in a writing competition.
As I begin work on a months-long, 40+ page project, I understand there will be a lot of work and sometimes where will have to make sure I handle my time judiciously. But the light at the end of the tunnel - the prospect of publication - makes it all worth it. If your article is published, as one professor put it, "it stays with you forever."
Specialized clubs and activities
The above three activities are ones I personally participated in. But my school, along with others, offers a large variety of clubs and student organizations that unite people aced upon their legal interest, professional goals, or perhaps just a love for animals. Regardless, these organizations offer opportunities to meet people, network, and enhance your law school experience overall.
The first year of law school is, doubtlessly, quite an experience. Even making it through the first semester should be enough to earn you a medal. The first semester of your first year will be, according to accounts I've heard from others and my own experience so far, the hardest you will undergo at law school. If you've made it this far, congratulations; but don't get lazy now.
In a few days, January will have ended, and by the end of the week, I will be closing in on the end of the first third of second semester. In some weird way, however, I feel like I'm farther along. This second semester is definitely not as trying - for one thing, any uncertainty I feel about the material is mitigated by the knowledge that I will know all of this stuff by the time exams roll around. On the other hand, this is shaping up to be quite a full semester. While the number of credits I am working toward this semester remains the same, my overall course-load has been increased by one class. Instead of three doctrinal classes and Legal Research and Writing, I now face four doctrinal classes plus Moot Court. The effect is somewhat offset by small adjustments in the hours per week for each class - Constitutional Law and my statutory elective, for instance, meet only three hours each, rather than four, per week. My understanding is that this set up is quite unique, as most law schools will have you continuing your fall semester classes, with the exception of Legal Research and Writing. On top of this new schedule, however, I am well within the midst of attempting to find a summer job, a necessity for any law student looking to pursue a career in the legal field once he or she has earned a law degree.
So, while we're nearly a month into 2011, I'm going to make some resolutions. I'm going to resolve to start earlier and work smarter on preparing for exams. I'm going to resolve to set aside time for job hunting. I'm going to resolve to make the best of Moot Court and try to be the best advocate I can for my side.
And I resolve to impart whatever knowledge I gain from my experiences to you, the reader, to help on your own legal journey.
First off, a bit of housekeeping. As Perry noted, we've been a little too busy to commit to our planned one-post-per-week regimen. Additionally, another problem I've encountered personally that I think our friend may have also run into is the fact that - and this is shocking, I know - not every moment of law school is full of something new and exciting worth writing about. After the initial shock of the first few weeks, I found that I settled into the steady groove of routine, just as I did in undergraduate school. Let this be a comfort (or a warning) to the aspiring law student.
Now, some of you may be wondering why I would bother writing a follow-up post about exams after Mr. Mason has done such a fine job himself. Simply put, after talking to him and reading his post, I have noticed that there were some major key differences in our respective schools' practices in giving exams that I wanted to touch on to give a fuller picture of what your exam period might look like.
Like Perry, my Thanksgiving was weighed down with the dread of the upcoming final exams. One of my professors had quite helpfully given a non-graded practice midterm (apparently it is a tradition at my school for one of the 1L professors for each section to do this) that we went over during a review session. This gave me a sense of what taking a law school exam is like and how it differs from a regular undergraduate exam (and, if you're like me and really didn't have any exams in your last year of college, put me back in the test-taking mindset). This should help underscore the real value of taking practice exams. As Perry said, many professors' past exams are available through the library - at my school, they actually post them online in PDF form. If your professor doesn't have any available - my civil procedure professor, for example, didn't have any up because this was his first or second year teaching the court - ask your professor which exams he or she would recommend you take for practice. They will be able to point you to other professor's with similar style. But enough has been said about that in Perry's post. I would like to reinforce one point he made - if you don't feel like going through the whole process of sitting down and timing yourself as you actually take an exam at least go through the fact pattern and issue spot. Also try to organize an answer if you can, even if you don't write it. The key thing that professors will look at in grading is 1) whether you hit all of the topics they wanted you to cover in your response and 2) whether it's organized. While many of my professors said that organization wouldn't affect the overall grade too much, the simple fact is that if they can't follow your argument, they won't know what you were trying to say.
Enough about general exam advice. Now I'm going to touch on some differences between Perry's exams and mine. There are three main topics I will cover: outlines, computer exams, and question types.
#1: Outlines Unlike Perry, I was actually able to bring my outlines and casebooks into most of my exams. The one exception was civil procedure, and even then we were allowed to bring our federal rulebooks into the exam and could write whatever we wanted in them (the publishers, quite handily, gave about 12 blank pages in the back of the book into which I was able to squeeze a hyper-condensed version of my outline). Whether or not you are given this luxury will affect your studying strategy. For instance, I probably spent a bit less time on "attack sheets" than Perry and more on familiarizing myself with my outline structure. Some of my outlines were massive - my criminal law outline was 58 pages, for reasons I will discuss shortly. Therefore, it was imperative that I not have to waste time shuffling around trying to find that one case or the elements of such and such crime. If you find yourself in this situation, here's a few of things you might consider:
Read over your outline. Again, and again, and again. Repetition can help you remember where exactly everything in your outline is located. This also helps reinforce the main benefit of the outline - a great deal of studying can be accomplished simply by making the outline because it forces you to go over the material all at once, which helps both in remembering some of the older material and synthesizing the whole course.
Table of contents/index. The main idea here should be obvious. However, I actually wouldn't recommend this option very much since it doesn't really solve the problem of shuffling through your outline.
Tabbing. This was my main strategy. To help pinpoint me in the right direction, I put tabs in my outline at the beginning of each topic in the class and wrote on the tabs which subject they corresponded with. That way I was able to read the essay prompt, identify the issues, and flip right to the section I needed, and go from there. This cut down a lot of time on my essays and was probably the most useful tool I had at my disposal.
Another potential variable is your professor's particular style, which is why, when taking practice exams, you use your own professor's past exams or those of professors with similar exams. Take my criminal law class, which resulted in a 58 page outline. By contrast, my property outline was 40 pages, and my civil procedure outline only 26. What gives? It has to do with exam style. My criminal law professor likes facts analogies to other cases and he helped write out textbook. This led me to go more into detail about the set up for each of the main cases and to include minor cases raised in the Notes and Questions sections. Most professors don't care, or even know themselves, what's in the notes for other people's books, but they sure remember them from their own. The property exam was a bit shorter because that professor only really highlighted the main cases and, for her questions, crafted a fictional state to help us avoid getting bogged down in jurisdictional questions, so I was more able to focus on doctrinal questions on that outline. However, she was very visual as well, so I ended up pasting a lot of screen-shots of charts and graphs from my class notes (like Perry, I use OneNote) to augment the main points. Finally, for civil procedure, the fact that we did were limited to our rulebooks really guided my outline structure. The main outline itself was only 26 pages, as I mentioned, and I from there halved it to fit in the 12 pages at the end of the rulebook. There were some subject-specific reasons for this as well - in civil procedure cases, the facts matter much less than the procedural question, though you can use facts to help identify the case. Still, my main goal was economy and creating memory triggers. In this respect, my civil procedure outline probably mirrored Perry's the most.
#2: Computer Exams This isn't so much a difference from Perry, as I believe he was in the same boat as me in this respect, but it is something to be aware of. Probably the second greatest difference between law school exams and undergrad exams, aside from the IRAC style and the issue-spotting focus on the questions themselves, is the ability to take exams on computers. As with note-taking, computer use in exams is optional and you should decide early whether it's right for you. Before you download the software (which, while distributed for free through your law school, can be a bit invasive), or if your school does not provide a practice exam template, try taking an exam with a word processor. For me, I preferred this style of exam-taking, because I tend to type faster and think on my feet better with a keyboard than a pencil and paper, largely due to the ability to cut and paste and go back to flesh out earlier ideas. I also noticed that it considerably reduced the strain on my hand. Plus, when writing under timed conditions like that, my handwriting tends to degenerate over time, which can be detrimental during the grading process. If you're the opposite from me in any of these ways, consider using the traditional bluebook method.
#3: Question Types I encountered three distinct types during my exams. They are as follows:
IRAC issue-spotting. The bread and butter of law school exams. Most exams will be comprised solely of these. The formula is simple, even if tricky to master - read the fact patter, identify the issues, organize a response, and write. Often you will be asked to role-play, usually as an attorney advising a client. However, sometimes the professor may give you a break - one of the essay questions I faced placed me in the role of a judge and asked how I would rule on the motions presented in the fact pattern, which effectively identified the issues for me.
Policy essay. Probably a fairly rare breed, but worth being aware of. In one of my classes, we spent a fair amount of class time talking about overarching policy goals. The second essay on that exam (worth considerably less in terms of points that the traditional issue-spotting essay) asked us to write an opinion about a hypothetical policy move in light of several of the topics we discussed during the semester. This was more like an undergraduate essay exam question, so if you encounter this, it may feel a bit more familiar than the more legalistic form of the issue-spotting essay.
Multiple choice. Needs no introduction - you have a scantron, you bubble in the right answer. These are often a bit more tricky than undergrad multiple choice questions, since many of the options will be "right," but one will be the most correct. As a variation on this, however, I did have one section of multiple choice mixed with short answers. Rather than bubble in a scantron, I had to write the answer into the exam software and cite the legal rule I used to justify my response. This gives you the chance to score some partial credit if you don't pick the absolute correct answer as long as you're reasoning is sound.
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Hopefully, between Perry's post and mine, you will be prepared for any kind of law school exam that comes your way. If I had to boil down our posts into one key sentence, though, it would be this: Make a good outline for your class and focus on being able to issue-spot, preferably by taking practice exams.
And now, because I have no classes that last all year, I bid adieu to civil procedure, property, criminal law, and legal writing and research. A new set of challenges await me as I enter torts, contracts, constitutional law, employment discrimination, and moot court. Hopefully, a new semester will bring new experiences and, with them, new posts. As this will probably be the last post before the new year, let me wish all of our readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy 2011.
My contracts exam is tomorrow and I've spent most of the day cleaning my apartment.
Granted, I've had 4 days to study exclusively for this exam and most of the hard-core studying took place over the last couple days. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
The exam period is an experience, to say the least. Within moments after finishing my last slice of pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, I was already thinking two weeks ahead to the looming exams in Torts and Civil Procedure, my two most difficult classes.
In those two weeks my classmates and I had to pull off a difficult feat - we had to essentially relearn the course material and master it in time for the exam. While the task may sound difficult - and it probably would have been close to impossible in college - we were given the entire Thanksgiving break, plus another week off before exams in order to arm ourselves with knowledge of Personal Jurisdiction and Negligence. (Notably, that week off before the exams is called "Reading Week," though it may have well been called "Outlining Week.")
I took advantage of three tools to study for my exams:
Outlines
Since early October I had been building outlines for my 4 classes - Property, Civ Pro, Torts, and Contracts. Creating them was simple enough: For each class, I would list the major topics and subtopics (ususally by looking back through the syllabus/casebook) and then paste in relevant notes. The result was an outline that didn't look too pretty, but the entire course was now boiled down into 1 document.
As for length, my outlines tended to run in the 20 page range, but with lots of white space in between. As my core classes do not allow us to bring our outlines with us to the Fall Exams, it was mainly created as a way to refresh my knowledge of the material.
A word of the advice for the Fall Exams. Get your outlines done by the Thanksgiving Break. If you can manage this, or at least get most of them done, you will be in good shape for studying.Your material will all be in one place, and you can then move to the second tool.
Attack Sheets
An Attack Sheet is a stripped down outline, either for the whole course, or a particular topic. I broke my attack sheets down by topic. These quick summaries never ran more than a few pages. The reason to create attack sheets is they are more accessible than outlines and they provide a quick list of issues/elements to remember. They also provide yet another way of looking at the material. Remember, this act of creating outlines/attack sheets forces you to remember and synthesize what you've studied.
For instance, the element of Duty in Negligence is full of many examples and exceptions. It takes up many pages in my outline. But one of my Duty attack sheets merely lists the different exceptions so I can remember the Duty "universe." I am particularly fond of my Medical Malpractice/Informed Consent attack sheet, which is basically a comparison table.
Practice Exams
These are the Holy Grail for law students. Practice Exams allow you to face the enemy again and again, without the stress of having your grade on the line. In many cases, these practice exams are actual past exams that professors have given. You may even be able to get answers for them too.
I took many exams under timed conditions, which really helped me get a sense of my time management. When I got tired though, I simply tried to spot as many issues in 20 minutes for a 1 hour exam, for instance.
My professors handed out several practice exams for each class, though I found many more through my school library. If you have the opportunity, take an exam and bring it to your professor to get their impressions. If you have a study group, consider taking them together and comparing answers.
Practice exams also let you mess up before it counts. I missed several large issues taking practice exams, but those failures forced me tor remember the issues come exam time.
The more you get used to taking practice exams under timed conditions, and being able to outline/spot issues effectively, the more you will be prepared for the big exam when it counts.
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A few closing thoughts. When Beagle and I started this blog, we thought we would have time to regularly update you on our progress. It seems we underestimated our work load. But fool us twice, shame on you. Hopefully now that we are used to the work we can get back to writing the occasional entry.
The first semester has been exhilarating in its pace and the sheer the absorption of knowledge. Next semester for me sees the addition of a new class, Criminal Law, on top of my existing workload.
In college, it was not uncommon for me to have 50, or even close to 100 page reading assignments. While the numbers may seem daunting, I got used to the workload after 4 years, and I also had the advantage of being a fast reader. But I was a bit anxious when I heard about all the reading I had to do in law school. How much reading could professors assign and seriously expect students to complete?
It turns out, the amount of reading, in terms of pages, is significantly less than what I had in college. A typical assignment might be 15-20 pages in a casebook. In fact, my Contracts class, which only meets twice a week, assigned only 34 pages for next week.
During my first few days in law school, I approached my reading assignments like I did in undergrad - read the entire assignment all the way through, underline whatever was important and then show up to class.
That didn't work.
Because professors employ the Socratic Method, they expect students to be engaged and ready to participate. For those who become targeted by the Socratic Method, participation is mandatory.
Unfortunately, the undergraduate method of just reading and underlining was insufficient. I remembered the material, but I felt I didn't have a good grasp of it. If I had been called on, that would have been the end.
I quickly adopted a new practice of actively reading, taking notes as I go, and writing a brief as soon as I read a case. I got a better sense of the material and even held on to more information the next day.
The problem is this process can be immensely time consuming. For instance, 17 pages took me 2 hours to get through, as I would have to stop and take notes constantly. When I decided to tackle a week's worth of contracts reading (34 pages), it took me close to 6 hours! Luckily, I've been working ahead of schedule, so at least I wasn't stressed out about getting tomorrow's homework done. As the year progresses, I'll share any tips I have on how to be more efficient at reading or taking notes.
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One of the reasons the process can take so long is if there are a lot of cases to read. Depending on how fast a reader you are, a case may take only a few minutes to get through, or may be much, much longer (especially if they are from the 19th century or earlier!)
My friend Beagle has described how to create case briefs using the FIRAC formula. One way to speed up the briefing process is to identify each element of FIRAC in the case as you read and mark their location in the margins. This process is called "Book Briefing," and allows you to quickly put together your brief without skimming through huge paragraphs of legalese.
While Book Briefing can be a useful tool for constructing your briefs it can be an excuse for lazy students not to do regular briefs at all. Why brief when you can just scan the case and identify each element when the professor asks for it?
While this works in theory, it's much more obvious to the professor and your classmates that you book briefed. If a case is several pages long, you will have to hurriedly flip through your casebook trying to identify the elements you listed, all the while trying to answer the professor's questions. If you had a brief prepared, you could have saved yourself the stress and simply read from your brief.
I've heard rumors that many 2Ls and 3Ls rely on book briefing a lot. Perhaps this works well if the professor mostly lectures. But if a professor goes for the full-Socratic experience, its better to be safe than sorry.
Law students are forced to deal with many challenges. They have to juggle courses like Contracts, Criminal Law and Civil Procedure in the same semester while making sure they can remember the details of complicated fact patterns. If a law student is unable to organize this information, it will add further stress come exam time.
I didn't want to fall prey to disorganization, so I began researching ahead of time how I could keep my information straight. The answer: Microsoft OneNote - a powerful organization tool that can keep your academic life in shape. Since learning about OneNote, I have used it to organize the notes I take in class and at home. (Full disclosure: I am not being paid by Microsoft to promote OneNote, but I really wouldn't mind. Are you listening, Steve Ballmer?)
From what I've observed, most people have no idea what OneNote can do - all they know is that it came with Microsoft Office and has been left untouched since they installed Word, Excel and Powerpoint. This is a shame because OneNote is particularly useful to students who need to organize a lot of information and access it quickly.
To the uninitiated, OneNote may not seem like much. "Why should I use OneNote when I can take notes in Word?" they ask.
Let me count the ways:
OneNote makes switching between class notes easy. For those who take notes in Word, you have to manually locate the files you want, which may involve going through several folders and sub-folders, depending on how organized you are. With OneNote, you can create separate "notebooks" or "sections" for each class, and flip over to them with one click. Likewise, you can create separate "pages" for each day's worth of notes without having to open multiple documents. You can also search across all these pages simultaneously.
Here, "notebooks" run down the side, while "sections" run along the top. It's up to you how to organize, but OneNote makes switching easy.
I have created a page for each day of notes, and can switch to and search all of them with ease.
Never lose your files again. OneNote automatically saves your work while you type. You don't have to worry about accidentally exiting without saving, or having a sudden crash wipe out your data.
Type where you want, how you want. One of the best parts about taking notes by hand is the ability to write anywhere on your paper. But in Word, you are limited to where you can type. For instance, you have to hit tab several times if you want to start typing at an indent. In contrast, OneNote allows you to start typing anywhere on the screen with one click. In practice, I use this feature to write small side notes in the margins while I am in class. OneNote restores the freedom to write anywhere.
Try getting Word to create text like this!
Tag notes for easy retrieval. This is perhaps OneNote's greatest strength. With just a couple keystrokes, you can "star" your notes as important, classify them as definitions, or mark them as questions to review later. I love this feature, especially the definitions. You can highlight important definitions, and then use OneNote to compile them all in a single list. You can even use OneNote to specify what class you'd like to see definitions for. Thus with little effort, you can build a dictionary for each of your classes.
All the definitions/important notes I've tagged for Civil Procedure.
I understand that people are used to taking notes with Word and may not be willing to learn a new program. But OneNote is simple to use and can keep your law school life organized and keep your stress levels down. Unfortunately, my Criminal Law professor for next semester is banning laptops completely, which means I will have to live without my trusty OneNote.
In an academic setting where homework dictates just about nil of your grade, you might be tempted to shirk it. After all, you went to undergrad, right? You only really have to know what the professor goes over in class. Just take good notes and you'll be good to go.
Well, not quite. Obviously, the entire grade (or nearly the entire grade - some schools and professors may allow a slight bump for good participation in class) is based on the final exam. However, you cannot expect to do really well on that exam without doing the reading, and the most important part of your reading assignments are the cases. Law school books often follow a format of setting up a topic through a normal textbook discussion of the issue followed by one or more cases designed to illustrate the concept. For example, a certain criminal law textbook devotes a section to how a capacity to obey affects the culpability of the defendant and follow it up with the famous The Queen v. Dudley & Stephens 14 Q.B.D. 273 (1884) case.
Regardless of whether you take notes on the reading or not, it is in your interest to at least brief the cases. You may have encountered briefing in your undergraduate studies, especially if you were a political science major or took pre-law courses. But for law school you will literally be reading a dozen cases or more per week, and it will be important to know the rules established in each of them for the final exam. Your briefs, in turn, need to be...well, brief. Prior to law school - and others have reported a similar phenomenon - my case briefs took almost an hour to complete, and would go on for two or three pages. Not very convenient to add to your course outlines when you start studying!
Within this first week, my whole practice of briefing has changed. I used to brief as I read, and I would painstakingly copy as much detail as I could from the judicial opinions. If you brief like that, you should know: you will actually save valuable time if you read the case first and then brief. In the short time I've been in law school, I've cut the amount of time it takes me to brief from nearly an hour to mere minutes, and the length of each brief is now between half and three-fourths of a page. They run a bit longer if there's a dissenting opinion. The point is, I've managed to increase efficiency and generate better-quality briefs just by changing my modus operandi in the practice.
However, it is possible that you have never even heard of case briefing. My experience during the first few days of law school was that there are as many people who have never had to do this for their classes before. The school, cognizant of this, has offered a plethora of opportunities for students to familiarize themselves with the process. They have offered how-to workshops, the professors have discussed it in the first days of the course, and some of the textbooks include short segments on briefing in the preface. Additionally, as I was reading some of the wide array of literature aimed at preparing entering 1L's, I came across a few chapters offering tips and guidelines (notably in Law School Without Fear, which is a pretty good primer overall if you're looking for one).
In short, there's just enough help out there to leave the unassuming student more than slightly confused. At the core of all the advice out there, though, case briefing can be reduced to one word: FIRAC.
That's no typo. FIRAC is an acronym that refers to the basic structure of a good case brief. It stands for Facts, Issue, Ruling, Analysis, Conclusion. I'll get into the specifics of what each of these means shortly, but let's stop for a moment and consider the advantages of this system. For one thing, it's pretty standard. You can adapt this basic form to almost any peculiarities in a professor's method (though it's important to point out that, as you won't be turning in your briefs, they really only need to make sense to you). Another big plus is that it mimics the basic format of your final exam answers, minus the facts portion (usually referred to, intuitively, as IRAC). Finally, it pretty effectively breaks down the main components of a case that you will need to know for classes. Having your cases set up in this format will enable you to quickly scan the page for the answer in class. When the professor singles you out and demands to know the issue raised in the case, it will be handy to just glance at your brief's issue section rather than drudge through the casebook, leaving an awkward silence in your wake.
The headings of each section may seem somewhat self-explanatory, but it is useful to describe them and their function in a law-oriented fashion. Each section has a very specific function in the overall calculus of the case and deserves attention as such.
1. Facts
The facts of the case. Since you will largely dealing with appellate decisions, the facts are often presented as a summary of what was discovered in the trial court proceedings - very rarely will an appellate decision concern a question of fact. This section may seem simple enough, but it will be your job to isolate the legally relevant facts. Since each case is dealing with a specific issue of law, you will only really be interested in those facts that lead the court to decide as it does. Let's use Elliff v. Texon Drilling Co. 210 S.W.2d 588 (1948) to help illustrate. The following is from Judge Folley's opinion:
"The petitioners owned the surface and certain royalty interest in 3054.9 acres of land in Nueces County, upon which there was a producing well known as Elliff No. 1. They owned all the mineral estate underlying the west 1500 acres of the tract, and an undvided one-half interest in the mineral estate underlying the east 1554.9 acres. Both tracts were subject to oil and gas leases, and therefore their royalty interest in the west 1500 acres was one-eighth of the oil or gas, and in the east 1554.9 acres was one-sixteenth of the oil and gas.
It was alleged that these lands overlaid approximately fifty percent of a hugh reservoir of gas and distillate and that the remainder of the reservoir was under the lands owned by Mrs. Clara Driscoll, adjoining the lands of petitioners on the east. Prior to November 1936, respondents were engaged in the drilling of Driscoll-Sevier No. 2 as an offset well at a location 466 feet east of petitioners' east line. On the date stated, when respondents had reached a depth of approximately 6838 feet, the well blew out, caught fire and cratered. Attempts to control it were unsuccessful, and huge quantities of gas, distillate and some oil were blown into the air, dissipating large quantities from the reservoir into which the offset well was drilled. When the Driscoll-Sevier No. 2 well blew out, the fissure or opening in the ground around the well gradually increased until it enveloped and destroyed Eliff No. 1. The latter well also blew out, cratered, caught fire and burned for several years. Two water wells on petitioners' land became involved in the cratering and each of them blew out. Certain damages also resulted to the surface of petitioners' lands and to their cattle thereon. The cratering process and the eruption continued until large quantities of gas and distillate were drained from under petitioners' land and escaped into the air, all of which was alleged to be the direct and proximate result of the negligence of respondents in permitting their well to blow out. The extent of the emissions from the Driscoll-Sevier No. 2 and Elliff No. 1, and the two water wells on petitioners' lands, was shown at various times during the several years between the blowout in November 1936, and the time of the trial in June 1946. There was also expert testimony from petroleum engineers showing the extent of the losses from the underground reservoir, which computations extended from the date of the blowout only up to June 1938. It was indicated that it was not feasible to calculate the losses subsequent thereto, although lesser emissions of gas continued even up to the time of the trial. All the evidence with reference to the damages included all losses from the reservoir beneath petitioners' land without regard to whether they were wasted and dissipated from above the Driscoll land or from petitioners' land.
The jury found that respondents were negligent in failing to use drilling mud of sufficient weight in drilling their well, and that such negligence was the proximate cause of the well blowing out. It also found that petitioners had suffered $ 4,620.00 damage to sixty acres of the surface, and $ 1,350.00 for the loss of 27 head of cattle. The damages for the gas and distillate wasted "from and under" the lands of petitioners, due to respondents' negligence, was fixed by the jury at $ 78,580.46 for the gas, and $ 69,967.73 for the distillate. These figures were based upon the respective fractional royalty interests of petitioners in the whole amount wasted under their two tracts of land, and at a value, fixed by the court without objection by the parties, of two cents per 1,000 cubic feet for the gas and $ 1.25 per barrel for the distillate. . . .
On the findings of the jury the trial court rendered judgment for petitioners for $ 154,518.19, which included $ 148,548.19 for the gas and distillate, and $ 5,970.00 for damages to the land and cattle. The Court of Civil Appeals reversed the judgment and remanded the cause."
Got all that? Don't worry; we'll break it down into a more manageable chunk shortly. It should be apparent why I chose this case as an example now - there a lot of facts, and they're all fairly convoluted and sometimes maddeningly specific. This is critical for judges arriving at opinions, but counterproductive if you're trying to come up with a manageable length of material to be able to quickly skim over. This is also partly why I advocate reading the case once over before trying to brief and paying attention to its contextual place within the casebook, as that will give you a clue what the case is about (we'll talk more about this in the issue section).
Basically, as we will see, this case deals with the law of capture. In Texas, landowners are generally considered to have ultimate title to their real estate property, which includes oil and other resources below ground. However, by the law of capture, if an entity is engaged in a reasonable production of, in this case, oil, then any oil that migrates from one person's property into the area of production is no longer considered the property of the original landowner. This will come into play somewhat in the analysis section, but it helps to understand the legal question at hand before extrapolating the relevant facts.
So what happened in Elliff? Basically, the oil company was negligent and some of their oil wells suffered a blowout. This in turn cased drainage from the Elliffs' property, which was adjacent to the area being drilled. They sued the oil company for damages. The oil company argued that the law of capture protected them from liability for the drainage. The jury in the trial court found for the plaintiff, but the Court of Civil Appeals overturned that decision.
And that, my friends, is actually a pretty darn good fact section. You might spiff it up a bit if you want to read something along the lines of "Defendants were drilling for oil on land east of plaintiff's property..." and so forth. But this gives us the basis underlying the legal dispute.
It's also important, I wish to note, to include the procedural history of the case. I actually like the make it a separate category, even though that messes up the whole FIRAC scheme a bit. Either way, do include what lower courts have said on the topic. This is especially important because law school deals mostly with appellate cases, since these deal with questions of law rather than fact-finding.
One final caveat is that the facts should not be taken as gospel truth - instead, the appellate court generally assumes that whatever facts the lower court decided upon are true. The appellate decision rests on applying a legal question to the given facts. When you're discussing the case in class, the professor may challenge you to look beyond the presented facts and decide if some other set of facts might be true - i.e. if, in a criminal case, someone made a deal with the police to escape prosecution.
2. Issue
The issue is the legal question in the case. We have already touched on it in the preceding section. We noted above that the plaintiffs were arguing based on their ultimate title to their land while the defendants cited the law of capture as a protection against a lawsuit.
The issue is presented as a question. For Elliff, then, we might say something like, "Does the law of capture protect the oil company in this case?"
Sometimes, the opinion will flat out say, "The issue the court is called upon to decide is this." Other times, it's not so easy. It will become easier to spot the issue as you read more cases, though. Also, as I mentioned before, reading the context material in the casebook can be a big help; when in doubt, it should at least get you in the general realm of the issue and give you some good clues.
3. Ruling
Another personal touch I like to bring to this is separating the holding from the rule established. What's the difference? The holding is just the result of the case - pretty much the answer to the question we came up with for the issue section. The rule is the common law precedent that the court comes up with to help decide future cases of a similar nature. The formal principle of justice - treat like cases alike - dictates that instances with similar situations ought to have similar results, and the rule gives future courts in a given jurisdiction guidelines for deciding future instances. If there is no new rule established, then this can refer to the common law precedent being cited (for instance, the oil company was arguing that the rule of capture should control the outcome) or statutory authority.
The relationship between the holding and the rule is syllogistic in nature. Ultimately, the rule is the major premise, the facts are the minor premise, and the holding is the conclusion. Let's continue with Elliff. The rule was that non-liability under the rule of capture cannot be extended to cases of negligence and the holding was that the Elliffs were entitled to damages. So, presented as syllogism, we would have:
Major premise: Non-liability for the company under the rule of capture does not extend to instances of negligence.
Minor premise: The drainage from plaintiff's property was the result of the company's negligence.
Conclusion: Therefore, the company is liable.
If you can easily chart this relationship, then you've correctly identified the rule, the holding, and the relevant facts. Remembering this relationship can help you if you're having trouble with any of these sections.
4. Analysis
This is the "why" of the court's decision, and the end toward which much of the opinion is geared. In Elliff, the court's analysis follows like so. The law of capture is intended to protect entities engaged in reasonable development of oil and other natural resources. However, it does not give companies the right to waste. Because the accident resulted from the company's negligence, the drainage from plaintiffs property constitutes a wasteful use of the oil. The drainage was neither legitimate nor a reasonable appropriation because it was caused by the lax care of the company's oil well. As a result, the plaintiff's lost the ability to produce the oil on their land as they saw fit. Therefore, the law of capture does not apply and the company owes the plaintiffs damages.
If there was a dissenting opinion, I like the include that as well. It will be good practice to at least be cognizant of opposing arguments, and dissenting opinions will only help you in class if the professor calls on you to argue the opposite position that the court took. Thus, while the dissenting opinion has no legal weight, it is good to be familiar with it.
5. Conclusion
I like to call this one the procedural result section. Basically, this is what the court ordered in regards to the case at hand. For Elliff, the case was reversed (meaning the Court of Civil Appeals decision is thrown out) and remanded (meaning it was sent back to the trial court for a new trial; there's a little bit of procedural mumbo-jumbo at the end about jurisdiction, but if you're doing this for your property class, that won't matter as much).
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And, with that, we have created a perfectly good case brief. As a last note, be sure to include the case title at the top of the page so you remember what case you're dealing with.
You should be briefing probably all of the cases you go over in class in order to have complete notes at the end of the semester. Like I said, your briefs don't need to strictly follow this format. This will just provide you with the foundation you will need. Most importantly, get a sense for what your professor wants you to know for class discussion and for what works best for you personally.
This is a skill that not everybody has going into law school. By familiarizing yourself with the process before you start, you will have an advantage both in crafting your study outlines and in participating in class.
